Part 4: A tortured path to Death Row

Forty-three hours after Stanley Howard was arrested, Chicago police detectives got the evidence that would help them send Howard to Death Row: a confession.

In seven double-spaced pages of questions and answers transcribed by a court reporter on Nov. 3, 1984, Howard implicated himself in the murder of a 42-year-old man that May. Then Howard signed the confession.

Moments later, Howard began to make what would become years of claims that police had tortured him to get the confession. Officers, he said, had kicked him, punched him and placed a plastic typewriter cover over his head--and Howard was able to produce medical reports supporting his allegations.

Still, faced with denials from the detectives, a Cook County judge refused to throw out the confession, and in 1987, a jury convicted Howard and condemned him to die.

Seven years later, in a stinging rebuke, an investigator for the Police Department's Office of Professional Standards concluded detectives had physically abused Howard during his interrogation and lied to cover it up.

But Howard, 37, remains under a death sentence, one of 10 Death Row inmates put there through the work of one of the state's most discredited groups of police officers--former Burnside Area Cmdr. Jon Burge and some of his detectives on Chicago's South Side. Among the accusations leveled at the Burge regime: that detectives, from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, beat suspects, shocked them with electric wires and put guns to their heads or in their mouths in an effort to get confessions.

While abuse during the Burge regime is finally being acknowledged in some quarters, prosecutors and police never have re-examined the Death Row cases linked to Burge to answer the question of whether innocent people have been sentenced to death.

For Howard, the abuse finding by OPS--the department's civilian arm charged with investigating police brutality--has done little to help him in his quest to be freed from Death Row. Rather than using the internal inquiry to try to determine if Howard's conviction was a miscarriage of justice, a top police official shelved the report and the department only reluctantly turned it over to Howard's lawyers.

In building a case for trial, the work of police serves as the foundation. When their investigations are tainted by credible charges that confessions were coerced, the integrity of a conviction suffers, and questions of guilt or innocence linger after the trial ends. In death-penalty cases, police misconduct undermines society's expectations that its harshest punishment will be meted out only with certainty.

For police and prosecutors, few pieces of evidence close a case better than a confession. After all, juries place a remarkable degree of faith in confessions; few people can imagine suspects would admit guilt if they were innocent. But, in Illinois, confessions have proved faulty.

Howard's case, his lawyers say, may be one example. As in many of the other Burge cases that resulted in a death sentence, without a confession there is little evidence against Howard--certainly no physical evidence, such as fingerprints, and no weapon. And in the years since Howard's trial, new information that could help reverse his conviction has emerged.

Criminal suspects frequently realize the damage they have done to themselves by confessing, then falsely claim that the police abused them. But what separate many of the Burge cases from others, and what make the accusations so troublesome, are their rich detail and numbing repetitiveness.

A federal judge and the Illinois Appellate Court have made rulings that, in often harsh language, suggest the alleged abuse under Burge warrants additional investigation and threatens to taint trial verdicts.

"It is now common knowledge," U.S. District Judge Milton Shadur wrote in one Death Row inmate's appeal in March, "that in the early- to mid-1980s, Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge and many of the officers working under him regularly engaged in the physical abuse and torture of prisoners to extract confessions."

Citing internal police accounts, lawsuits and appeals, Shadur said that torture occurred as an "established practice, not just on an isolated basis."

Burge was fired from the department in 1993 for torture in one case. Reached at his Florida home, he declined to comment.

Police tactics scrutinized

Charges of police misconduct--from manufacturing evidence to concealing information that could help clear suspects--are central to at least half of the 12 Illinois cases where a man sentenced to death was exonerated.

In two of those cases, neither of which is linked to Burge or his detectives, men whose confessions put them on Death Row were cleared and set free.

Ronald Jones had long claimed he confessed to the 1985 murder and rape of a South Side woman only because Chicago police beat him repeatedly. After nearly eight years on Death Row, he was exonerated by DNA evidence earlier this year.